The Prince of Asgardwood
by jetplanejane
Summary: Jane is a prisoner of Farbauti until she escapes into Asgardwood, where she comes under the protection of a dark-elf prince. Loki offers to escort her to safety, but he's more than he seems. For Farbauti, fighting for survival in a world where the old religion is being forgotten, wants Jane's heart, and Loki is prepared to give it. Until he falls for the mortal he must slay. Lokane
1. No Such Things As…

The horse had more care than its rider, for it sensed the ancient power of the greatwood and reared up, refusing to be coaxed off the road. Jane slid from the saddle and looked north for signs of her pursuers. At any moment she expected the horsemen to emerge from the mist like a ghost army.

"This is where we say goodbye," she told the animal, before slapping its rump and sending it trotting off down the road. By the time the Queen's men found it and discovered her deception, she would have long disappeared into the forest.

But the wood seemed to resent her presence. Dying trees, their branches bowed and brittle, clawed at her face and hair as she plunged into the thicket that marked the very edge of the wood. Burrs like evil little stars clung to her dress and needled through the coarse cloth at her arms. As she passed beneath their perches, ravens croaked and flapped their wings and defecated, mocking her clumsy passage through the boggy woodland and over knotted vines and thick, cantankerous old roots.

Rumors of Asgardwood's enchantment did not scare Jane – they were just stories to frighten children into obedience. Pagan gods and eldritch creatures couldn't harm her. It was the living she was wary of. If the riders caught her she would be killed or, worse, made a prisoner, until the Queen saw fit to take her heart.

Despite her slow, stubborn progress, Jane was starting to feel confident that she would elude capture. The greatwood did not seem especially great or daunting. Perhaps she would even reach the north-western border by sundown. But she had not got more than a thousand yards, when she heard the protesting squeal of horses and, fainter, the frustrated shouting of their riders. They should not have stopped, Jane thought, feeling the onset of dread. Either her horse had wondered back to the spot where she'd left the road or there was an experienced tracker amongst the riding party.

She moved more quickly, feeling the efforts of her exertion in her legs and lungs. The wood had begun to relent: wild decay giving way to pale gray-green horsetails, and scatterings of Scots pines and birches. If it had not been for the patchwork of lichen, she might have seen the rune marks cut into the bark. The soft peaty earth felt more firm beneath her worn goatskin boots, but the land now sloped upward. She stopped to catch her breath, leaning against the cool trunk of a centenarian ash. Jane's pursuers were well-fed and stronger, and they had axes and falchions to cut their way through. She couldn't hope to outpace them, but she might easily hide in this place.

_Just a little further,_ she urged herself, hiking to the top of the incline where she stood overlooking a hollow filled with more trees, sunk in a carpet of dead leaves. Moving forward to descend into it, the hem of her burr-beaded dress snagged on the woody roots of brake. Jane reached back to unhook the fabric and slipped. Down she tumbled, her hair gathering leaves, until she came to rest at the bottom of the clearing, something sharp and rough and woody jabbing her in the side of the head.

The sudden, overwhelming dizziness brought back the childhood memory of Hal stuffing her in a barrel and rolling her down the sheep-dotted downs beyond the castle walls.

_"It'll be fun, I promise!"_

It had been anything but. Amusing for him, yes, listening to her scream in terror as the world cartwheeled about, threatening to suck her out. He had doubled over, guffawing, as Jane emerged, shaking and wailing, from the cask.

Only now – with her heart trying to beat itself out of the inside of her head and her vision blurred and failing – did she finally smile. How strange that she should think of the princeling after all these years. How much she had had hated him for his cruelty and how she missed him now.

"Hal," she whispered, giving up her last conscious breath to him and the trees.

* * *

Loki thought her dead, at first, from the twisted angle of her body, and berated his twin companions. "You said she was alive."

The ravens cawed in protest, so he knelt to examine her; clasping her throat and feeling for sharp bone beneath bruised skin. But she was warm and whole and her life pulsed strong and steadily in his grip. Poking out from her over-dress was a gold trefoil cross. He pulled it out, palming the religious object. Stupid woman. Had she thought it would protect her? Her god had no power here.

Still... "You have heart, mortal." The forest had tried to claim her and failed. It seemed a shame to have to slit the throat of one had made it this far.

He plucked the cross from Jane's neck (he would keep it as a trophy, for his trouble – Farbauti could have the heart) and drew a dagger. With his free hand, he brushed aside the thick, leaf-tangled mess of her hair which now obscured her face and stopped and stared, and stared as one who would never look at another again. Mortals, both men and women, had always been beneath his likes and dislikes, but this one was the loveliest in memory. Her lips were full and slightly parted, her face pale and pinched with winter and loneliness – the kind that Loki knew; the one that found solace in solitude. Drying blood caked the hairline at her temple where the jagged edge of a broken branch had struck her and Loki winced appreciatively. _Oh dear, that must have hurt_ – an unfathomable reaction given what he was about to do to her. What he had been about to do to her. Now he leaned over her and pressed his lips to the broken skin.

"Hal...?" Jane emerged from her dream, long-lashed lids fluttering open to stare up into the ageless, smitten face where a pair of green, gleaming eyes peered down at her.

"You're very beautiful."

"You're not Hal." He was not even human for his ears tapered to a point. Lank hair the color of crow feathers was tucked behind them. The very next thing Jane observed was the blade, still poised in his hand.

It didn't actually _occur_ to her to hit him, she simply did: hard and square in the mouth. The sucker punch failed to knock him over or even unbalance Loki, but startled him and allowed her the opportunity to scramble out from under him.

"What are you?" she demanded, picking herself up off the forest floor.

_Not too bright,_ though, Loki lamented, touching his fingertips to his lips, checking for blood. Despite the force of the blow, there was none. "What do you think I am?"

"You look like an..." _Only –_ "There's no such thing as elves."

"And yet here I am. And here _you_ are. Such _fire."_ He nodded to her right hand, cradled against her chest. "Did that hurt? I'd say you deserved it, only I think I deserved it a little more. Word of advice: if you're going to hit someone, never tuck your thumb in your fist unless you want to break it."

The dagger, he saw, still had her attention. "This?" With a flick of his wrist, the blade dissolved like gray smoke on the air. "Was only a precaution. I mean you no harm." _Not just now._ Loki raised his hands in surrender, trying to demonstrate his sincerity.

When Jane was a young child, her uncle had amused her by 'conjuring' a gold coin from behind her ear. By the time she was six, she was old enough to understand that it was nothing more than a trick of dexterity and concealment. What the elf had done with the knife was something else entirely. Yet there was no magic – no _real_ magic – in the world any more than there were elves or dwarves or giants.

"Do you hear that?" Loki drew her attention to the sound of men close by. "They'll be here at any moment. I can help you."

The way he was looking at her – with reverence and covetous intent – made Jane uneasy. His smile seemed like it would never cease, eclipsing all the world with its mischief. Was it supposed to reassure her? It did nothing of the sort! "I think I'll take my chances."

Quick as a bird, she made a run for it, darting to her right. Loki was faster, crossing the distance between them in three long strides. He grabbed her willowy frame to him, his body hard against her back, her feet treading air for a moment before he set her down. The ravens echoed her scream in their tongue and took flight as the first of the Queen's men appeared at the lip of the hollow. Feeling the bitter steel of the dagger lap at her throat, Jane stilled her struggling. _So much for meaning me no harm._

"Lost something, have you?" The elf called up to the men. There were six of them, not counting the two ducked down on the other side of the slope and the pair of fools who thought themselves cleverly concealed by the forest on either side.

Their captain, a seasoned broad-shouldered campaigner in wolf-skin and a leather bird-horned helm said, calmly, "She is a fugitive of the Queen."

"In _my_ realm. Go and tell your queen she belongs to me now."

_Belongs?_ Jane thought incredulously. _I don't_ belong _to anyone!_

"You forget your place, eldritch prince. This land belongs to the Queen, and the prisoner, also." He pointed to her with his sword. "Surrender her to us and we may let you live."

Loki's chuckle was the sound of something that had lived a hundred lives of men and heard every threat uttered by mortal and immortal alike. "In that case..."

"They'll kill you anyway," warned Jane, defying the blade and her own fear of being handed over.

"Oh," he whispered, his breath warm – voice low and dangerously seductive – against her ear, "I rather doubt that." Loki was tempted to kiss her again – for the sake of it this time, not because she was hurt. His immediate desire would, however, have to wait.

He turned and pushed her to the ground at his back. Over her shoulder, Jane watched Loki step forward toward the hunting party. The wicked smile edged up to the right, dimpling his chiseled features. "She's all yours if you can take her from me."

"What are you _doing?"_ Jane demanded. "They'll kill you."

"My, my, is that _concern_ I detect?"

"Self-preservation." Jane trusted the elf about as far as she could throw him, but she sensed that her chances were marginally improved in his company. At least he would not deliver her heart up to the Queen on a platter.

"Have a little faith, mortal, if not in me, then in your god." His eyes slid surreptitiously to the left, picking out the archer, then to the right. "But just in case, you might want to run."

_So much for faith,_ thought Jane, and then Loki threw the knife. It split the archer's chest before he had time to loose his arrow. The second, launched from Loki's right, never found its mark for the elf leaned casually out of the projectile's path and the feathered shaft _thwacked_ into the bole of a rune-scarred tree.

"That was unwise," he lamented. And then the captain's companions were charging.

Looking back as she ran, Jane saw a nugget of pale peat light bloom into green fire in the palm of the elf's hand. He hurled it, theatrically, at the warriors, but the captain escaped his sorcery and came bellowing at his victim, a falchion held high above his masked face. Loki dispatched the beserker, effortlessly, rounding on him and cutting his throat with a second dagger. He cast the man's body aside with a bloodthirsty grin.

Something creaked and snapped and the arrow-wounded ash uprooted itself from the earth, scrabbling toward the melee with nimble roots. The sight almost toppled Jane and she slipped and skidded down a muddy slope, falling to her knees in a pile of leaves before picking herself up and running on. Behind her, the screaming ceased abruptly.

Ducking out of a clearing, Jane scrambled beneath the exposed roots of an ancient tree. There was no other sound save for the noise of blood in her ears and, after she caught her breath, the wood's brooding silence. How long she waited, tense and alert like some feral hunted thing, she didn't know. It felt like an hour, but perhaps it was only a handful of minutes. Was this how the lost fawn had felt when Hal had cornered it and she (under his encouragement and the small but powerful cruelty inherent in all children) had taken aim at it with a slingshot? Jane had just begun to entertain the small hope that she'd escaped surviving riders, dark-elf and murderous tree when an axe lodged itself in the leg-thick root to the left of her head.

With a shriek, Jane crawled out from her hiding place. The huntsman would need precious moments to make a second attempt, but with no place to hide his intended victim made an easy target. Desperately, Jane clutched at her chest for the reassuring hard, holy shape of the cross beneath her over-dress. "No," she breathed, devastation compounding despair, when she discovered it gone. For the first time since her incarceration, tears stung her eyes and blurred her vision of the charging huntsman, axe raised high.

He never lobbed it, for the whorled tree Jane had sheltered beneath, reached out its limbs and snatched the screaming man into the air. There it wrapped vengeful branches about his limbs and quartered him in a spray of blood. Jane felt the sticky warm drizzle on her face. Before she could even wipe her mouth, the tree let the dismembered corpse and limbs drop to the forest floor.

Bile burned in the back of Jane's throat – not at the gruesome sight, but at the idea that she ought to _thank_ the tree. And, yet, her gratefulness gagged its way out of her: "...nk you."

The tree merely huffed, leaves rustling, trunk creaking, and lumbered back to where it must have stood for centuries before she had disturbed its peaceful existence. Jane swallowed tears and the acrid taste in the back of her throat, and straightened – trying to maintain a dignity that no longer existed except in her mind like some idyllic, mirror-reflection of herself. She was supposed to be a queen, was she not?

Wiping her face against her sleeve, inhaling the stench of copper and intestinal effluent, Jane turned and ran.

* * *

By the time she came upon the stony stream, she had lost all sense of direction. Too exhausted to care, Jane collapsed at the water's edge, gulping loudly and deeply from her cupped palms. The water was mountain cold and snow sweet, and a not unreasonable voice in the back of her mind cautioned her that in an enchanted forest, the water was also likely to be enchanted. But she was too thirsty to care. After she had drunk her fill, she felt better for it – stronger, somehow. Her reflection, too, was changed: the wound at her temple was almost completely healed. Touching her fingers to it, she felt only a mild tenderness. How was that possible?

"My friends told me you were going the wrong way."

At the sound of his voice, Jane startled. The elf emerged from behind a tree, unharmed and grinning.

"Unless you're trying to reach Jotunfjord. There aren't any Frost Giants left to trouble your passage, but you're not dressed warmly enough and I fear you'll only find your way back into Farbauti's hands sooner."

Wiping her mouth against her forearm, Jane felt behind her for a weapon. Her fingers closed around a partially submerged branch, the wood slimy with algal growth. _And how exactly will that help you?_ a voice in her head mocked. _You've seen what he's capable of._

"Who are you?" she demanded, her voice clear and confident, trying to silence the nagging doubt.

"I am Loki, of the Asgardian Wood." The elf prince spoke proudly, pleased that she had asked. "Will you tell me your name, mortal?"

She had no desire to do so. "You killed the Queen's men."

"Well, yes." An irritated frown knitted his brows. What a dull and obvious observation to make. Loki hoped that she was not always this stupid, because if that was the case, he would soon tire of her. "They were going to kill you. Or does having your life saved displease you?"

It was more the manner in which they had died that disturbed Jane. "Was that you with the trees? Did you make them come alive?"

"They have always been alive. But the forest here is older than I am and the trees do what they want. _I_ certainly have no influence over them." Not after what he had done to their caretaker. "And I'm sure you were the very least of their concerns. They were only avenging themselves." His smile was equal parts mischief and magnanimity as he approached her. "Shall I guess your name?"

Jane rose, brandishing the wet branch and Loki paused. "Ooh. Are you planning to hit me with that?"

"If you come any closer."

Mindful of her warning, though clearly not intimidated, he ventured, "Is it Ígulfríðr?" The name suited her best, Loki thought, for despite the fragility of her appearance, she was quite prickly. "Or Fiölmóð, perhaps?" He continued to move, slowly and deliberately. "No? What about Áfríðr?"

"Jane," she offered, reluctantly, hoping that if she told him he would come no closer. "My name is Jane."

_Jóka_. "A Christian name." Loki regarded her for a long moment, deciding whether he liked it or not. He decided that he did. "I found something that belongs to you, I think." From inside his cloak, he retrieved the item he had removed from her person earlier ('stolen' seemed like such a _strong_ word) and let it spool from his fingers.

At the sight of the cross, Jane brightened, her eyes as wide and dark and deep as the old places of the world. Something that was almost a smile touched her lips. Then, just as suddenly, the light was snuffed out and the hostility returned. "Give it back."

"You might ask nicely, after all I've done for you."

"Done for me? You – You grabbed me and held a blade to my throat – claimed ownership of me! How dare you!"

Her outrage at his entitlement revealed more about herself than she realized. _You are the daughter of a king_. But that still did not entirely explain Farbauti's keen interest in this mortal. "Better that Farbauti thinks you my prisoner...and I did say 'might'."

The familiar way with which the elf used the Queen's name unsettled Jane. They were in some border dispute, she had gathered, but this was more than that. She looked longingly at the cross. No kindness was owed its keeper, but if it convinced him to part with it, then she would submit – _grudgingly_. "May I _please_ have it back?"

"Of course." Loki held out his open-palmed hand, knowing full well that Jane expected him to toss it into neutral territory. But then they would be back to where they started, wouldn't they? At the same impasse of mistrust. "I will not hurt you, you have my word."

She shifted her weight from one foot to the other; uncertain, misgiving. Perhaps not the fool he had taken her for, then. "Let me earn your trust. And I will trust you not to hit me with that." He nodded his princely chin at the branch.

"You have a dagger...and magic. It's not a fair exchange."

"No? I thought Christians didn't believe in the Old Ways." Loki unsheathed the dagger and let it fall on the ground at his feet. "There. Does that satisfy you?"

"Turn around and close your eyes. Hands where I can see them."

Meeting her every demand with a purse-lipped smile, Loki thought: _Something tells me this is more about_ you _earning_ my _trust_.

It was a good minute before she risked an approach. He could hear her footfalls and the rustle of her coarse skirt. "You took a nasty fall back there where I found you. How's your head?"

"Fine," she replied, tartly, trusting in her god more than Loki's word as she made her way cautiously toward him.

"Are you hurt anywhere else? You must be tired. And hungry." He was attempting to engage rather than distract, but Jane was having none of it. She ordered him to be quiet. "You're ill-mannered, for a princess."

The pause in her progress was almost confirmation enough of his suspicions. "I'm not a princess."

"A queen, then?" Blindly, he started to turn toward her and was rewarded with a jab in the back with the branch.

"I'm not a queen, either." It was not an unequivocal lie, Jane reminded herself, guilty. With her left hand she reached out and snatched the cross from the elf's slender, long-nailed fingers; backing quickly away.

"There," said Loki, "was that so awful?"

Jane was preoccupied with the cross, securing it about her neck – she had even discarded her beloved branch. "Thank you."

She had been so determined to give Loki the cold shoulder and here she was, thanking him – sincerely – for returning the item. It did not simply bring her closer to her god, but to someone else, too. "Who gave that to you?"

"My father."

"Let me guess: he was murdered by Farbauti." When Jane looked at him, a challenge in her eyes – _What do you know about it?_ – he offered, innocently, "Oh, it's only a guess." An easy one.

"Can you tell me which way to get out of the forest?"

Many paths led out of the wood. It would depend, Loki said, on where she was headed.

"I need to reach Selvigborg."

The dark-elf regarded her with renewed interest. "What's at Selvigborg?"

_None of your business,_ she wanted to tell him, but held her tongue. "A friend of my father's."

This stubborn creature had still not _asked_ for his help, so he volunteered to take her there.

"Why? What's in it for you?"

"Do I seem the mercenary type? Can't I help you just because I _want_ to?" The hard look she gave him suggested that, no, _he_ probably couldn't. "Very well, then...I'm offering because I want the pleasure of your company, Jane. It's not every day that one meets the daughter of a king who is neither princess nor even a queen."

"What makes you think my father was a king?"

"Because Farbauti would not trouble herself for anyone less."

He seemed to know a good deal about the witch-queen. "Is it far?"

"A day by air, as my friends fly." And sometimes Loki himself, too. "Three days on foot. There is a stronghold not far from here. We won't reach it by nightfall –"

"_Three days?_ It's a day by road."

He chuckled. "You won't make it Selvigborg in a day. You won't make it at all. Farbauti will have spies on the road."

Risking their eyes seemed preferable to spending three days in an enchanted forest with a dark-elf whose intentions were questionable at best. "Which way?"

"Surely you jest." But his smile faded when he saw that she could not have been more serious. "I won't come with you."

"Well, I won't ask you to."

Infuriating, idiotic woman. There were moments, yes, when he enjoyed her resistance to his reason – found her fierceness and obstinacy alluring – but this was not one of those times. "I should kill you and spare you the trouble," Loki threatened, retrieving the dagger. But he surprised her by offering it to her, hilt first. "A parting gift. You will need it."

His mischievousness had been replaced by bitter resentment. Jane thought of a spoiled child given and then denied a new plaything. She almost hesitated to take the blade, but didn't want to run any further afoul of his temper.

"Jotunfjord." The elf gestured downstream of the stony creek and then immediately to a vague point behind her left shoulder. "Trollheim. The road," he continued, pointing toward the unremarkable trees, their trunks lost in shadow, "is that way."

There was no path, nothing to indicate she had even come that way. Jane wished she'd had the presence of mind to leave waymarkers.

"You're losing the light, I'd hurry if I were you. And watch out for the rune trees. They move around at night and I don't imagine they'll even know they've stepped on a slip of a girl like you until they're shaking your entrails from their roots." Without even so much as a farewell, Loki began to stalk away in the opposite direction, deeper into the forest; his cloak fawning at his ankles.

Jane looked back in the direction of the road, or at least the direction Loki had indicated it lay. _I can make it. The stars will be my guide._ That alone boosted her confidence. Gripping the dagger, feeling the decorated hilt dig into the skin of her palm, Jane started determinedly back through the trees.

The forest was quiet now – almost _too_ quiet. It felt like she was being watched. What things besides the rune trees called this place home? Apart from the ravens, Jane had seen no other sign of fauna and it troubled her. Perhaps the forest creatures were all nocturnal, fell, biting things. She had, he realized, no means of making fire. _Don't be ridiculous,_ she told herself. _There's no such thing as..._ But she could not keep telling herself that.

"I'm not afraid," Jane called out, more for her own benefit than to caution anyone or any_thing_ that might be listening. _Well, I'm not. I'm nervous. There's a difference._

Twigs snapped in a sun-dappled glade to her right and Jane froze. "I'm just passing through!"

Overhead the canopy of trees closed in, obscuring the sky. Steeling herself, she drew the dagger.

* * *

"Wait! Elf!"

He heard her long before he saw her, bellowing and running with all the grace of a bee-stung bear, but ignored her apurpose until she had almost caught up with him.

"Loki!"

_There._ The thing he had been waiting for: his name on her lips – swollen, breathless, panting; cheeks flushed. He ate the delicious smile threatening to split his face and turned around. "What?" His brow arched arrogantly and expectantly – face a mask of solemnity – as he looked down upon her from the granite outcropping he had scaled.

"I changed my mind."

He let her stew for a moment; let her think that he had not forgiven her for her impertinence. "Of course you did." His sudden smile was as dazzling as polished moonstone and Jane found herself smiling, too, if only slightly (out of relief, she told herself).

Loki sank to his haunches and extended his hand; soft and cool as moss, despite the wicked nails, around hers as he helped her up.

"Here." She tried to return the dagger.

"Keep it," he told her, his eyes devoted and searching her face for something he might have missed the first time he had looked upon her. "A token of your adventure, something to remember me by."

As much as she wanted to, Jane did not think she would easily forget the cunning, handsome elf – dagger or no.

Above them, Huginn and Muninn squawked and wheeled, speeding home ahead of the advancing night, and power older than any yet left in the world reached out from its dark tower in the north.

_You have something that belongs to me._

"How much further?" Jane asked, hurrying to keep up. For every step that he took it seemed that she was forced to take three.

"Not far. Are you hungry?"

"Starving, actually."

_Loki. You promised me the heart._

_"And you can have it just as soon as I've had my fun."_

_She must not reach Selvigborg._

_"Oh, don't fret, Mother. She won't even reach the edge of the wood."_


	2. The Prince and the Wolf

Jane felt the dusk chill through her dress and leggings as she followed her dark elf guide into a sunless clearing on the footslopes of a low range of hills. At the center was a soot-blackened fire ring; evidence that people – hunters, perhaps – had passed this way before.

"We'll camp here," Loki announced. "It's probably a lot less comfortable than what you're used to." He frowned and cocked his head. "Or not, considering Farbauti's hospitality. You still haven't told me how you escaped her prison."

"I fooled one of the guards."

Loki knelt to collect firewood from a store secreted beneath a lichen-encrusted rock. "Really?" The only person she looked like she'd fool was herself. "Did you seduce him?"

Anger and indignation colored Jane's face. "I _befriended_ him."

The guard, Api, was not much more than a boy and had been newly assigned to the tower watch. Being far from home and forced into the Queen's service, he empathized with Jane in her captivity and isolation. Sometimes he would sit with her during her meals and talk, telling her all manner of things. He was lonely and Jane had been a good listener. "He said I reminded him of one of his sisters."

That was what she had wanted: for him to think that she was his friend...until she'd pressed the fork to the back of his neck. Api had laughed at first, thinking it bold jest, but Jane had forced him to set aside his sword and slip her the keys to her cell.

Her elf guide leered at her, grinning with lecherous approval. "I underestimated your resourcefulness, mortal. I'm impressed."

"_Impressed? _That boy's probably _dead_ because of me!"

"Yes," Loki cackled, "almost certainly."

Jane balled her hands into fists; she wanted to slap him. "How can you be so cruel, so _heartless?" _

"Cruel? Heartless? Who saved your life?" He dropped the wood at the edge of the fire ring and advanced toward her threateningly. "How can _you_ be so stupid? Heartless is, _literally, _what you'd be if you hadn't escaped. Even that fool guard had the sense to see it. You were miles away before anyone noticed. Do you think that was luck? Or your merciful god?" Loki sneered at the cross resting between her breasts. "That boy waited until he thought you were far away and then he raised the alarm. He _allowed_ you to escape, don't you see?"

"I betrayed him, why would he do that?"

"I don't know!" Nor did Loki care. "'Why' is hardly the point. You think his death your fault, it isn't. He made a choice. So you can stop blaming yourself and crying about it."

"I'm _not_ crying!"

"Your eyes," he observed, dryly, turning away from her, "are damp."

Jane blinked. It had nothing to do with tears – she _wasn't_ crying – but a sudden realization. "How do you know the Queen wants my heart?"

It took Loki less than a moment to realize his error; that Jane had made no mention of Farbauti's use for her. _Damn. _A rare mistake, but one he could ill afford. "I thought it was obvious," he replied, smoothly. "Youth and beauty conceal her true form. There are spells for that, but Frost Giants aren't exactly known for their magic. Even _I_ have difficulty maintaining an illusion for any great length of time. Consuming the heart of a young and very beautiful woman like yourself would make the spell more permanent."

If he thought flattery would placate or distract her, he was very much mistaken. "What're you saying? That the Queen is a...Frost Giant?"

Before she let her skepticism win, he hoped she'd remember that she was standing in an enchanted forest, talking to an elf. "What did you think she was?"

"Exactly what she looks like: a vain queen – a human one – who practices black magic."

"Black magic?" Loki chuckled. "You Christians are so concerned with the dichotomy of all things: good and evil, black or white. Magic is neither. If anything, it's gray. I used one spell to kill Farbauti's men and now..." He took her by the wrist, gently but without her permission – ignoring her demand to know what he thought he was doing – and placed an egg-sized ball of greenfire into the palm of her hand.

Jane flinched, instinctively, expecting heat and pain, but Loki's grip arrested her. Contrary to her fears, the flames were as cool as the taste of wild mint on the tongue. "Careful," the elf warned, as she braved rolling it around in her cupped hand. "It's not us you want to set alight. Throw it into the fire."

She did as he instructed and the fatwood ignited, orange flames eating up the green.

Her delighted smile pleased Loki more than it should have and he felt a sudden unaffected warmth toward her. "See? Almost perfectly harmless." He closed his hands around hers. "Would you like me to show you another trick?"

The nails were long and yellow as old bones, but his skin was uncharacteristically soft for someone who spent his life in the forest where the wild things were. Jane swallowed. She didn't like how close he was, nor the intent way he was looking at her. Gathering herself, she pulled her hand from his and said, almost apologetically, "It's witchcraft."

"Witchcraft? Jóka," he tsked, disappointed in her narrow-mindedness, "it's just a bit of fun. The son of your god did magic. He turned water into wine, did he not? As my brother was so fond of reminding me I can only turn wine into snakes."

"You have a brother?"

"_Had – not_ my blood brother."

The distinction seemed important to him and Jane couldn't quite tell whether Loki had loved or loathed his sibling. "What happened to him? Did he die?"

"Oh, much worse than that," he hinted, with sadistic cheerfulness. "He was forgotten."

"Forgotten? How is that worse than death?"

"Creatures of magic exist in this world for as long as people believe in them. Mortals pray to us and curse us – those of us who make mischief." His smile was more prideful than contrite. "But you worship and curse a new god. People scratch our names from the runestones and carve crosses in their place. Most of us exist now only in the stories that parents tell their children at night. We're not really here."

"_You're_ still here."

"I," said the elf, with a wink, "am not so easily forgotten."

"Are there more elves here in Asgardwood?" Jane wondered if any of them were as incorrigible as her guide; at once beautiful and brutal; both infuriating and charming; if they would make her feel so conflicted.

It was a reasonable question, but one that spoiled his mood. "Only one," he said, at length, unable to meet her gaze. "She lives on the northern edge of the forest, at Fensalir – quite out of our way." The old wives of the eastern Heathermoor still called her Mother and appealed to her to heal their sick and wounded. Loki had called her Mother, too, once, but Farbauti was his only family now.

"I had better find you something to eat," he said, when the silence had grown awkward. The smile was weak; a superficial attempt to recover from the uncomfortable emotion of a painful memory. "We don't have far to go tomorrow, but you haven't eaten in a day. I hope you like rabbit. It's the only thing I'm likely to catch."

"You're going hunting, _now?" _The mark- and wagon-stars were already visible in the darkening sky. "Loki, you can't possibly to see anything." Let alone track and kill it, and with what? His dagger?

"I'll manage," he assured her. "I can't very let you go hungry."

"So you're going to leave me here?" The idea of being abandoned to the company of rune trees didn't appeal to Jane. If they were driven into a murderous rage over arrow or axe wounds, she could only imagine how they felt about fire in their midst.

"This afternoon," he said, with a chuckle, "you couldn't wait to be rid of me, now you don't want me to go. Are you always this difficult to please?" _Not that I don't enjoy a challenge, _he mused. _The rewards are always_ so _much sweeter. _"You'll be safe until I return, and if anyone or any_thing_ manages to best my spell – which I doubt – you have a dagger. Use it. And stay in the circle."

"What circ –?"

"The one you're about to step out of."

Jane halted well ahead of the edge of the clearing and glanced about the forest floor, seeking runes, a line drawn in the leaf- and needle-littered earth – anything to suggest a circle. "I don't see any –" She looked up and was startled by Loki's sudden absence. "Loki? _Loki," _Jane hissed, not daring to raise her voice louder than a whisper.

The pines creaked, their swaying tops painting the inky star-spattered sky, but of her guide there remained no sign.

Sighing in resignation, she returned to wait by the warmth and comfort of the fire. It was more than an hour since her guide's departure when the wolves came. Jane had started to doze off when she heard them howling. How many there were, she couldn't tell, but she knew the dagger would be useless against even one. As for Loki's circle, magic or not, she doubted that a hungry predator would care too deeply about it.

Twin wolf-shapes loomed out of the deep shadows, their lupine hulks moving like ghosts among the trees. As they stalked past the clearing, they showed little interest in the woman huddled close to the campfire, sparing her no more than an ancient, dark-eyed glance before they were eclipsed by the rambling forest growth.

Jane remembered to breathe and exhaled, feeling the tension flood from her body. But her relief was only temporary, for a third animal showed itself. It was a wolf like the others, but gray, and smaller. There was calculating intelligence in its eyes and the longer it watched her, the more familiar its gaze seemed. It couldn't actually be _him, _could it?

When Jane was a child, Erik had told her that one of the Aesir – a goddess – took pity on him and transformed herself into a white mare for him to ride home after he'd become lost in the wilderness. Her father, who'd only tolerated Erik's stubborn belief to the Old Ways because they'd been friends since childhood, dismissed it as no more than a drunk fool's tale.

Jane could almost believe it now. "I know who you are," she said, quietly, more to herself than the wolf, as it loped off.

_Loki. _

* * *

He returned to find Jane asleep beside the languishing fire, but left her to rest, enduring her soft snoring while he skinned and gutted his kill, and set it on a tree-branch spit over the fire.

"Hal..."

The dark elf looked over at her with renewed interest. That name had been on her lips when she opened her eyes in the glade where he found her, but he'd scarcely paid it any mind.

Whoever the man haunting her dreams was, he seemed to be a source of torment, causing her to toss in her fitful sleep. Attempting to spare her further torture, Loki squeezed her shoulder. "Jane?"

"Go away," she muttered.

"Go away, come back," he teased, stroking the backs of his fingers across her fire-warmed cheek. "Make up your mind, Jóka."

She awoke, reluctantly, and blinked up at his pale elvish face. _You. _"There were wolves."

"Geri and Freki." He plucked a brittle edge-decayed leaf from her hair as she sat up groggily.

Jane thought of his raven companions. "More of your friends?"

"Something like that. I told them about our little battle on the edge of the wood. Tonight they will feast on Farbauti's men. And you..." He reached out and lifted the spit from the fire. "...dine on rabbit."

The sight and smell of food woke Jane properly and she wasted no time tucking in, burning her fingertips and tongue, despite his warnings. "Thank you," she said, when her manners caught up with her stomach. "You're not eating?"

"I already did." The wild, wolfish grin would've been answer enough.

"I saw you. You were one of the wolves."

"Obviously. How else did you expect me to hunt at night?" Loki nodded at her half-eaten meal. "It took me more than an hour to catch that. Birds are more comfortable forms. I could've changed into an owl, but I wasn't exactly going to feed you mice."

"Could your magic change other things into birds?"

Her sudden curiosity aroused his suspicion. "What sort of other things?"

Picking at the spit, Jane ventured, tentatively, "Another person?"

"Ah, I see. A mortal, perhaps?" Loki couldn't resist a jibe. "And what would your god say to me transforming you into a bird? I thought you didn't hold with witchcraft."

She felt foolish and it made her a hypocrite for asking yet Jane was unrepentant. A bird, she pointed out, would take less than a day to reach Selvigborg.

"You escape one castle only to flee to another. What's waiting for you there? Is it Hal?"

"Hal?" Jane looked at him sharply. "How do you know that name?"

"You spoke it in your sleep."

_I do that? _Jane shook her head, dismissively. "He was a boy I knew." She didn't want to share her memory with Loki. Hal was none of his business. "I already told you why I'm going."

"You told me half a truth." _There's something you're not telling me. _The elf met her gaze and saw there that he'd guessed correctly, but he wouldn't embarrass her by forcing her to deny it. "It doesn't matter, your business is your own." He leaned forward to stoke the fire. "I could transform you into a bird, but it would be no more than an illusion. You might as well flap your arms. Skin-changing is older, more powerful magic and it would take you a lot longer than three days to learn."

Jane fell silent, concealing her disappointment. A part of her had been open to the idea of learning magic almost as much for the sake of it as the delivery of her urgent message. Loki made it look and sound so innocent, and _safe. _If he'd wanted to harm her, he'd had ample opportunity. She felt her initial distrust burning away.

"Loki?" He had excused himself to retrieve more wood and was kneeling at the store, his left side burnished in the firelight. "Thank you, for saving me."

Loki bowed his head, indicating that all was forgiven. "You should try to sleep."

"Good night," she said, turning in. The ground was hard and cold, but she was asleep almost as soon as she closed her eyes, and Hal was waiting for her on the edge of her dreams.

* * *

He was more man than boy, now; wrestling a kite in the wind, his iron-gold curls blown across his forehead. He called to her, "I could use some help!"

Shielding her eyes, Jane squinted up at the toy; it was fashioned from his standard: a red griffin on a white field. "Why should I help you, after everything you did to me?"

"You can't still be angry. That was years ago!"

"You never apologized."

"I wanted to," the princeling confessed, the regret keen in his voice. "I meant to...but I was terrified."

The easterly had become an icy gale, dimpling Jane's skin beneath the thin wool of her dress. She had to shout to make herself heard. "Terrified of what?"

"Of you."

She couldn't hear him. "What?"

"That you'd still hate me!"

Hal cried out in anger and frustration as the wind ripped the kite from his hands, and stood with his head bowed, angelic iron-gold curls blown across his forehead. His hands were cupped as if in prayer, and bloody. At first, Jane thought he must have injured himself trying to hang onto the kite, but when she looked upon his face, she saw that it was pierced with two arrows.

This was more memory than dream; she'd seen him like this the night he died, trying to rescue her from the castle. She'd been too shocked to do more than stare – a thing carved of stone – as her world, and Hal along with it, fell into ruin around her. The cruel wind robbed her of her grief, drying her tears as they blurred her vision and she turned from the prince and his wounded face, eyes grave and cloudy as blue opal.

A wolf appeared on one of the furthest downs, melting from a great sea mist sweeping in on the wind. It howled as if calling to her and Jane decided to follow it.

Behind her, the prince begged her to stay, warning her that it was dangerous. But Jane did not look back. She would not dream of Hal again.

* * *

Firelight and shadow played across the Jane's fluttering eyelids as the elf prince laid his cloak over her and tucked the high collar snugly beneath her chin.

_She dreams of you. _A woman made of flickering flame took shape in the fire. _The spell is working. The sooner the better. _

Loki was in no mood for Farbauti's company. "She's quite anxious to reach Selvigborg. I couldn't help noticing that you're just as keen to see that she doesn't. Why is that, I wonder."

_Very soon my army is going to march on it. Your little plaything means to spoil the surprise I have planned for Erik. _

_Jane's guard. _Of course. He must've had knowledge of the queen's plans and shared them with her. "Erik Selvig isn't a threat to you. He's neither Christian nor king, and he has no army."

_He has become a Christian. They say he succored a prince who was killed in battle. The Christians believe that their god raised the boy from the dead. _

"I'm quite sure Christians aren't supposed to believe in that sort of thing." Loki poked about the rabbit entrails with his dagger in a bored sort of way. His mother's schemes were of little interest to him unless they served him directly.

_Yet they believe it. Belief is a powerful thing. The prince has become a king, fierce and pious, and he gives the people hope. They would follow such a man. He could be dangerous to us. _

"Dangerous to you, _not_ to me."

_Poor Loki. Do you think yourself safe, here, behind your trees? The world will forget you, too, unless we bring it back to the Old Ways. _

"All things have their end," he observed, philosophically. "I've walked this world a thousand years."

_And you would walk it a thousand more! _

"Are you _afraid?" _He laughed scornfully. "You are! _You, _a Jotun queen! Frightened and outwitted by hapless mort –"

Burnt, cracked firewood exploded, sending a cloud of sparks swirling about Loki's face like a carousel of vicious little falling stars. He hissed as one of the embers singed his skin.

_Careful, Laufeyson, or next time it will be your precious Asgardwood that burns. _Farbauti cackled, smoke and flame curling upward as her fiery avatar clawed its way into the sky.

But it was Loki who would have the last laugh. "I don't like threats." He drove the dagger into the gut pile and sacrificed the anemic rabbit heart to the fire. It would be the only one Farbauti would get from him.

Beside him, Jane chased a wolf through the mist. "I hope it's a good dream, Jóka." Loki smoothed her hair and leaned down, pressing his lips to hers to seal the spell. "I'm going to keep you, and you're going to forget all about Selvigborg."


End file.
